A 52-year-old Escondido woman has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for bank and tax fraud tied to an eight-year real estate scam, authorities said.

A U.S. District judge in Los Angeles on Monday ordered Safieh Fard, who owned a jewelry store, to serve 63 months in prison and pay $549,000 to the IRS for unpaid taxes.

Court records say Fard, her sister and two sons obtained mortgages by overstating their incomes and assets to banks from 1997 to 2004. They used the mortgages to buy several higher-end homes in Newport Beach, which they sold and transferred ownership among themselves, investigators said.

Eventually they sold the homes to others and turned nearly $4 million in profits from those sales, court documents say. Those gains, which came in lump-sum checks or wire transfers, were not reported to the IRS.

Those gains were put into several bank accounts and reinvested in more properties, authorities said.

A jury in Santa Ana convicted Fard in November on one charge of tax fraud and one charge of laundering proceeds from bank fraud.

Fard's sister, Sedigheh Bahramian, and two of her sons, Mohsen Kikalaye and Ahmad Kikalaye, were sentenced in 2010 for bank fraud.

The agencies involved in this case include the IRS, Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Santa Ana.